Abstract

This article examines the ethics and affective complexities of care in Samanta Schweblin’s Good and Evil and Other Stories, arguing that the collection foregrounds the imaginative, relational, and often troubling demands of caretaking within a more than human world. Drawing on feminist and posthuman care theory—particularly the work of María Puig de la Bellacasa, Joan Tronto, and Donna Haraway—the article analyzes how Schweblin’s stories stage encounters in which care involves uncertainty, power asymmetry, and the necessity of imagining the needs of others who cannot fully articulate them. In the stories “Welcome to the Club,” “The Fabulous Animal,” “An Eye in the Throat,” and “Atlàntida,” specific relations of care reveal both the failures and transformative potential of caregiving practices. These narratives depict care as simultaneously sustaining and oppressive, exposing how guilt, substitution, and silence shape relationships among humans and nonhumans alike. Schweblin’s fiction frames care as an embodied, relational practice that unsettles human exceptionalism and highlights the ethical importance—and limits—of attempting to perceive the world from marginalized perspectives.

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